People around the world enjoy photography and distributing photographic prints to their friends, relatives, and neighbors. Recently, a new generation of cameras has become available that form images using digital technology. Personal electronic handheld digital cameras are now commercially available from Nikon, Canon, and other manufacturers.
In a personal electronic handheld digital camera, light reflected from a subject passes through a lens and strikes a digitizing device, such as a charge-coupled device (CCD) detector. The CCD detector, and associated circuitry, converts light rays into digital electronic signals that form an image of the subject. One or more digital images are stored in a solid-state memory device within the camera or in a removable memory device such as a flash memory card. The camera contains a microprocessor that executes the image formation and storage operations, under control of a computer program embodied in firmware such as read-only memory.
A display integral to the camera, such as a liquid-crystal display (LCD), provides a viewfinder function by showing images formed by the lens and CCD prior to storage. The display also shows status information about various camera settings.
After a picture-taking session, a user of the camera connects the camera to a personal computer. Alternatively, the user removes the removable storage device that contains stored images from the camera, and connects the removable storage device to the personal computer. The personal computer executes a program that can read the stored images, either from the camera or the removable storage device, and display the images on a display of the personal computer. Under software control, the personal computer can also send one or more images to a printer, store the images as files on the personal computer, and carry out other functions.
One problem of this approach is that a user of the digital camera is required to use the personal computer to obtain a reasonable display of the digital images. Generally, personal computers have displays that are far larger and have far better resolution and image quality than the small LCD displays typically found on digital handheld cameras. As a result, using a personal computer is the only practical way to obtain a useful displayed image of a digital image taken with a digital camera.
Another disadvantage of the prior approach is that a personal computer or its equivalent is required to print a tangible copy of a digital image taken with a digital camera; the camera cannot produce a printed copy itself. However, most consumers do not own or cannot afford a high-resolution color printer that is capable of producing a high-quality printed image of a digital photo. Consumer-grade printers can produce a good-quality grayscale image or black-and-white image, but high-resolution color printers are expensive and not common in the home computer environment.
As an alternative, a user of a digital camera can take the removable storage device to a commercial image printing service. Conventional photo developers are beginning to offer such services. The user pays a fee to the service provider, and the service provider prints a hard-copy print of an image, generally using a high-resolution color printer. However, this involves delay and fees that are undesirable. In particular, in this alternative, when a user of the camera wishes to send a tangible copy of an image to a relative, friend, or neighbor, the user is required to wait for the service provider to print the image and deliver it to the user, before the user can send the print to the desired person. There is a need to expedite the image transport process.
A further problem with the prior approaches is that the user of the camera is required to use a personal computer to send a digital image made with the camera to a distant friend, relative or neighbor. Personal computers are not ubiquitous on a worldwide basis or even in large, highly industrialized nations such as the United States. There are millions of people who enjoy taking pictures but do not have access to a personal computer, cannot afford one, or do not want to use one in order to send a picture to someone else. For these people, there is an acute need to simplify and expedite the process of sending pictures from themselves to someone else.